Welcome to the world of Thought relationships. As you may have noticed the layout of Thoughts in TheBrain isn’t random. Every time you click on a Thought things change, but they are always displayed in certain areas of your display. These areas represent different types of relationships. Let’s start with the basics and then move on to more details.

Intro to Parent, Child, Jump, and Sibling

Active Thought
Relationships are always displayed around and relative to the Active Thought (the Thought in the center.) This gives you a view point or perspective to view and derive other relationships

There are so many possibilities for classification and organization of information in TheBrain. If you are just creating a new Brain, the first step is to map out your ideas with Thought relationships. Once this is done, you can add another compelling level of insight to your knowledge map with Thought Types and Tags.

Want to build a Web site without having to worry about how people are going to navigate around it? Would you like to just put your Brain up on your site and have the linked pages show up in an area on your site? This slightly more involved than basic Brain publishing and embedding, but not difficult really. This short tutorial will walk you through everything needed to get TheBrain’s slick navigation, visualization and search up on your site quickly and easily.

To build a Brain and set it up for use as your web site navigator, you will need the following:

A web site

PersonalBrain 5

The ability to edit the source code for the home page of the site

A basic understanding of HTML, including how to layout a page using div tags

The new WebBrain hosting service is now in beta. It lets you easily publish Brains online in just a few steps. You don’t need a Web server, all you need is your Brain. Just use the File > Create BrainZip command and then upload the file at http://webbrain.com. Once published, your Brain can be viewed from just about anywhere. It’s currently still in beta, but there are a lot of features in place already.

One of the most powerful features that TheBrain offers is Instant Activate. Just type in the first couple letters and up pops the Thoughts you need. Then simply click on that Thought and you’re exactly where you need to be in seconds. The power of this feature should not be underestimated. It gives you the ability to get to any Thought and its related content in seconds. This is especially critical for users juggling multiple projects or tasks. Anyone who needs to shift contexts, respond and bring up information quickly will love this feature.

Instant Activate Just type in the first couple letters of what you need and a list of your Thoughts appear.Click on the Thought and get your information instantly.

Your Brain is only as good as the Thoughts inside it. Here is a listing of the most useful Thoughts for your Brain that can take your mind mapping into a whole new direction, capturing more aspects of your life for greater insight and instant recall.

1. Your Home ThoughtOkay, every brain has one. But it’s only fitting to mention this Thought because your Home Thought is where everything starts and other Thoughts flow from. As a new user your home Thought is the start of your Brain. If it is a Brain about you, your home Thought should be your name. If your Brain is topic specific the subject of your Brain should be your home Thought. Now you can start creating “child thoughts” under this Thought. (To learn more about getting started, read my getting started post.)

“One of these things is not like the others, One of these things just doesn’t belong, Can you tell which thing is not like the others By the time I finish my song? Did you guess which thing was not like the others? Did you guess which thing just doesn’t belong? If you guessed this one is not like the others, Then you’re absolutely…right!”

-Words and Music by Joe Raposo and Jon Stone

Editing and Overhauling your Brain? Well, start singing! Okay if you haven’t sung this song at least once in your life, watched Sesame Street or maybe played this game with your kids then you are probably finding this a rather odd start to a blog post on editing a Brain. But if you watch my Brain 202 webinar then you will probably realize that this is the perfect tune for the task of cleaning your Brain. And will lead us into Tip #1 for editing your Brain…